New WordPress Stack Exchange Offers More Features Than WordPress.org Forums

A new WordPress Stack Exchange is now in beta. This is a resource that covers the exact same material as WordPress.org’s existing forums. Not familiar with Stack Exchange? It’s a programming Q&A website that synthesizes aspects of wikis, blogs, forums, and Digg/Reddit. You can ask and answer questions for free. Whether you’re a WordPress beginner or a seasoned developer, the new WordPress Stack Exchange is bound to be a valuable resource for you.

Joel Spolsky outlines why the Stack Exchange may be more helpful to you than existing forums at WordPress.org:

• WordPress.org’s forums don’t have voting, so you have to read through every answer and decide for yourself which one might solve your problem.
• WordPress.org users don’t have reputation, so there’s no way to see whether you’re getting an answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
• The WordPress.org forums don’t have wiki-style editing, so collaboration is impossible.
• A WordPress user has to log on to answer a question, so the burden of participation is higher.

The WordPress Stack Exchange offers multiple sorting options.

Right away you will notice how many more options there are for sorting questions: newest, featured, hot, votes, active, unanswered, as well as sort by tags or users. When you’re having trouble articulating your problem but want to see if it’s already been answered, you can select the sorting option that makes the most sense to you.

Badges help to motivate user participation.

As you use WordPress Stack Exchange to ask and answer questions, you can earn badges, which will appear on your user page and in your user card. This helps you to be able to gauge the value of another user’s advice, especially if you are selecting from multiple answers for your problem. It taps into the basic human drive for achievement and is more motivating than you might imagine.

While reviewing the site I found it remarkably easy to surf around to various topics, without feeling like I was digging through pages and pages of text. Features I enjoyed most:

• Live previews of your response to questions as you type
• Clean, attractive and cheerful UI makes it feel more like fun than troubleshooting
• Activity timelines and reputation graphs
• Usage stats displayed, including the percentage of answered questions
• Individual user RSS for questions, answers, and comments

This is certainly not a replacement for the WordPress.org forums, nor is it to say that the WordPress.org forums are not helpful. Rather, it’s a comparison to the forums that you already know and many of you have been using for years. If you want to try a new way to find answers to your WordPress problems, head over to the WordPress Stack Exchange and give it a spin. Feel free to leave your thoughts and a personal review here in the comments.

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BuddyPress Tip: How to Remove a Member From a Group Without Banning Him

Ever wanted to remove a member from a group who isn’t really doing anything objectionable? Perhaps he’s just sitting around taking up space? A few users have asked for this in the past on the BuddyPress forums. R-a-y was inspired to create a core patch for this option and you can pick it up and paste it into your functions.php file if you’d like. Otherwise, it will be available in BuddyPress 1.2.6, as John James Jacoby has added it to the core. If you want to test it out first, head over to testbp.org.

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Daily Tip: Automatically Sign Users Out of WordPress or BuddyPress After Inactivity

Want to make sure that your users get logged out after a period of inactivity on your site? Install the new Inactivity Auto Sign Out Plugin. It works with both WordPress and BuddyPress and is composed of a single PHP file. You can easily edit it to change the inactivity time period to suit the needs of your site, as well as a redirect URL for auto log out.

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Daily Tip: BuddyPress Sitewide Activity Widget Updated with Many New Features

Oftentimes users will ask in the forums about how to show BuddyPress sitewide activity in the sidebar of the site. This is handy for showing activity as it’s happening without the user having to return to the activity tab.

Brajesh Singh created a BuddyPress Sitewide Activity Widget for this purpose and has recently updated it to include many new features that BuddyPress enthusiasts are sure to appreciate:

• Posting from widget
• Activity list can be restricted to logged in users activity when a user is logged in
• Blog admins can use the widget on their blog and It will show blog admins activity only.
• Show/hide avatar
• Show/hide feed link
• Show/hide the activity filters tab(the links that appear at the top and allows to filter the activity).
• Include only specific components activity in the sitewide activity widget(e.g include only profile/blog activities).
• Exclude only specific components activity from the sitewide activity widget(e.g exclude group activities from the activity list).
• Localization support

The plugin is in the WordPress repository but hasn’t been updated there yet. The best place to get it is on Brajesh’s site: BuddyDev.com

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WordPress News: Option to Subscribe to Support Topics by Email is Now Available

Email subscriptions are now enabled for individual topics on the WordPress.org support forums. Just look to the right of the topic and you’ll see “Subscribe to Topic.” You must be logged in for the subscription link to appear. The updates will automatically be sent to the address you have registered with WordPress. Now you can post issues you’re having and not have to check your favorites or RSS. You’ll get a notice right in your email inbox when someone leaves a reply. This should help to eliminate so many abandoned topics in the forums.

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My Chatbox: A New Micro-Blogging Service Built On BuddyPress

Anton Koekemoer is a professional blogger, developer, web technology consultant and a marketing strategist with an emphasis on Web 2.0 technologies. We recently noticed My Chatbox, a newly-created micro-blogging community that Anton built on the WordPress and BuddyPress platforms, and asked for the opportunity to interview him about the service.

Please tell us a little bit about My Chatbox and what inspired you to create your own micro-blogging service.

After launching a couple of other BuddyPress social networks, I realised that it is such a big framework with so many options on the front end that members sometimes gets overwhelmed with all the features that the framework offers.

I already had the idea of creating a scaled down micro blogging network and was looking at other options until I read a blog post on WPMU.org on How to build a Mini Twitter Site with BuddyPress and decided to give BuddyPress another go – and it works. Thanks Sarah!

What kind of user is attracted to an independent micro-blogging service?

The whole idea of My Chatbox is quite simple – anyone can create their own Chatbox (micro blog) for themselves or for their business regarding any topic or niche. Using the flexibility of BuddyPress, Chatboxes (micro blogs) can have multiple administrators and moderators to control the top level content on the micro blogs so you can have multiple micro blog contributors. Have a look at this Chatbox for an example – http://mychatbox.me/chatboxes/tech-ed-africa-2010-durban/

No one except for the admins and moderators can post top level content on the Chatbox, but it all depends on how the Chatbox was setup (public or private) and then members can reply to content on the Chatbox and become “members” of the micro blog.

Why did you select 200 characters for the limit on user posts and how were you able to implement that?

I decided to use 180 characters, but later increased it to 200 characters to give more room to express oneself and maybe include a YouTube video or a Flickr image on your update.
Any micro blog posting, status update or activity reply on My Chatbox, is limited to 200 characters to keep the modern rule of micro blogging – “keep it short and sweet”. The remaining characters are displayed on the text area where members add content. Micro blog descriptions are also limited to 200 characters.

How does My Chatbox handle the geo-location for user updates?

If a member registers the normal way without using Facebook or Twitter, they have to complete a couple of profile fields. These includes an “About me” field together with a location field “City, Country” that is used to pin point their location on a Google map displayed on their profiles. Similar to BuddyPress.org without Gpress.

Members can also edit their profile to include other social media channels they belong to and this is then displayed with icons on their member header with links to those channels.

Please explain the idea of creating your own niche “Chatboxes” focused on topics for more in-depth micro-blogging conversations.

Same Idea as above where you can have multiple contributors to a Chatbox . To give you an example – If you own a record store, you can create your Chatbox (XYZ Records) and let all your employees contribute to the Chatbox focused on your products or services. Other members can reply, but only you and your employees can add top level content to the Chatbox.

What plugins are necessary for powering your MyChatbox.me and did you have to create any custom functionality not currently available?

The site uses a couple of popular BuddyPress plugins including the BuddyPress Oembed plugin so that members can share content from other popular social networks such as videos and images.
Other plugins included is a modified activity stream hashtags plugin as well as a modified Group tags plugin that is used for tagging the micro blogs – still needs a little bit of work. The micro blog tags are also limited to 55 characters.

I am also using the BuddyPress followers plugin and disabled friend connections so that you can only follow members.

What functionality do you plan to add to MyChatbox in the future?

Lots of custom modifications have been done to the theme and custom plugins were developed for all the functionality.

There is quite a couple of future plans for My Chatbox and one is to create a mobile compatible theme as everything is steering towards mobile.

My Chatbox is far from 100% complete (will it ever be the way technology is growing?) so if anyone wants to help contribute to My Chatbox, contact me or register on My Chatbox and create your own Micro Blog.

Thanks to all the BuddyPress plugin contributors.

Contact Anton Koekemoer on Twitter @antonrsa or at http://www.antonkoekemoer.com.

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Written by Sarah Gooding · Filed Under Free Plugins, News, Syndicated, Wordpress 

BuddyPress Moderation Plugin: A Must-Have Community Management Tool

As a BuddyPress admin, you always have the ability to delete users and content. However, if you have a very active community, it can be overwhelming to attempt to police your site for inappropriate content or behavior. Hiring moderators may not be a cost-effective option for your site.

This is where BuddyPress Moderation steps in as a solution to help site owners keep their communities in line. It uses crowdsourcing to manage the task of moderation sitewide by attaching flags to content created within the various components. Francesco Laffi has been working tirelessly on this plugin as part of his Google Summer of Code project and this is the first stable release.

How does BuddyPress Moderation work?

BuddyPress site admins can elect to have the “flag” button placed next to certain content types, including status updates, activity comments, blog posts, blog pages, blog comments, members, groups, forum topics, and forum posts. The admin can set an automatic warning for users whose content has been flagged and automate deletion after a set number of violations.

The moderation queue in the dashboard shows each flagged item, how many flags the user has received, the reporter, order and filters, and actions that can be taken for each.

The moderation panel also has hotkeys built in, similar to the WordPress comments table hotkeys, for quick navigation and management.

Francesco also included documentation with some examples for integrating it with your own content types. After a fair bit of initial testing, I haven’t found any bugs. I can’t think of a site that wouldn’t benefit from adding BuddyPress Moderation, even if it’s only activated on a select few content types. It’s unobtrusive and keeps your BuddyPress community healthy and balanced. Depending on how active your community is, this plugin can keep members from spreading sour vibes and help your community to flourish. BuddyPress Moderation is a must-have tool for community management.

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WordPress News: Free Searchable Tweet Archive Theme For Backing Up Tweets

Did you know that your tweets become unsearchable in a matter of 1.5 weeks? You’ll be able to find them in your stream later, but searching will become more difficult. This is why you might consider creating an archive of your tweets with WordPress. It’s really amazing to see how many unique uses people are finding for the WordPress platform.

Themelab.com released a free WordPress theme today that allows you to easily archive all of your tweets in a searchable format. It is made up of pure CSS and supports custom WordPress 3.0 menus and backgrounds. You can use WordPress to create an archive that you can backup and search. In order to properly use this theme, check out this tutorial for setting up your automatic archival system: How To Create a Searchable Tweet Archive with WordPress. Theme files from the tutorial are available for download, or you can grab ThemeLab’s free theme and get your archive up and running.

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Daily Tip: Bulk Import Users by Email Address into WordPress Multisite or BuddyPress

Boone Gorges put out a new plugin today called Simple Import Users. It allows you to import users into your WordPress installation by adding a list of email addresses. Accounts are created for each with usernames based on the email address. If you have BuddyPress installed, the welcome email to your users will include a link to the “Edit Profile” screen to help them get going with their accounts. This is a handy plugin for educators wanting to import their students or a business directory, family blog, or any situation where you know all your users’ email addresses. Head over to Boone’s site for more specifics on Simple Import Users.

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Daily Tip: Bulk Import Users by Email Address into WordPress Multisite or BuddyPress

Boone Gorges put out a new plugin today called Simple Import Users. It allows you to import users into your WordPress installation by adding a list of email addresses. Accounts are created for each with usernames based on the email address. If you have BuddyPress installed, the welcome email to your users will include a link to the “Edit Profile” screen to help them get going with their accounts. This is a handy plugin for educators wanting to import their students or a business directory, family blog, or any situation where you know all your users’ email addresses. Head over to Boone’s site for more specifics on Simple Import Users.

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